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Remembering Trudeaumania— Canada`s “Half-Blood Prince” Was As Disastrous For Canada As Obamamania

Barack Obama`s inaugural day is upon us…and Obamamania has
reached such comic dimensions that I can`t bring myself to
think seriously about it.

So let`s step back and consider Obamamania`s closest analog:
the extravagant “Trudeaumania“
that propelled an
obscure law professor to the prime ministership of
w:st="on">Canada in the fateful year 1968.

"He seemed a man neither of the left nor of the right, but a
man for the future. His campaign was based on the simple,
unequivocal proposition: `One
w:st="on">Canada.` As a
bilingual French Canadian, he appears to be the right man to
bring the French-and English-speaking peoples closer
together."

"An
archetypal ambiguous figure in whom the various parts of
a deeply-divided society can jointly invest their
contradictory hopes. Such figures spring up regularly in
conflicted polities."

Of course, under Trudeau, the French and English-speaking
peoples of
w:st="on">Canada only
moved farther apart. But that wasn`t the point of
Trudeau`s policy, it was merely the effect.

Trudeaumania didn`t last, but Trudeau did, clinging to power
for a decade and a half. In that time, Trudeau fundamentally
remade Canada in his own bilingual image—imposing French on
English-speaking Canada and allowing Quebec effectively to
ban English in French-speaking Canada—and driving the
country permanently to the left.

Like Obama in 2008, Trudeau had a gaudy ideological history
that the media decided to forget about.

Back when Trudeau was a law student in
Montreal
in the early 1940s, Fascism looked like the Wave of the
Future so it appealed to the Man of the Future, especially
the Nazi`s
w:st="on">Vichy puppet regime in
w:st="on">France. He even
planned a revolution againstles Anglais to
take Quebec
out the war.

Trudeau`s Fascist sympathies, which lasted until as late as
1944, were no doubt well-known in French-speaking circles,
but came as a surprise to the English-speaking media in
2006, a half-dozen years after his death, when Young Trudeau: Son of Quebec, Father of Canada, 1919-1944, a
biography by
Max and
Monique Nemni, who were the editors of the political
magazine founded by Trudeau, revealed what he had been up to
in his twenties.

When Trudeau`s boys started losing the Big One, he switched
his allegiances 180 degrees and became a markedly
anti-nationalist man of the left. For example, the
32-year-old Trudeau got himself invited to a
Communist front conference in Stalin`s
Moscow
in 1952, where he bragged to an American diplomat`s wife
that he was a
Communist. When alarmed American State Department
officials queried their Canadian counterparts, they were
reassured that Trudeau was merely naïve enough to be fooled
by Stalin. But 1952 was rather a late date for that, and
Trudeau was no longer a child.

By 1968, Quebec
nationalism was on the upswing. Unlike
black nationalist emotions in
America, it was a problem
that had a variety of feasible solutions:

Quebec,
a perfectly plausible nation-state, could secede (as the
American colonies had left the British
Empire in 1776) and set up shop as an
independent country.

Or, if Quebec
didn`t want to go,Canada could
expel it, as the Czechs more or less tossed out the
Slovaks in
1992 (to the benefit of both).

Trudeau`s solution, however, was much more complicated,
combining his newfound post-D Day hatred of the
nation-state, and his insight that majority rule wasso pre-1968.
Minority privilege would be the new touchstone.

Therefore, Trudeau set about to bribe the French Canadians,
at
the expense of the British Canadians, to stay in the
federation. That Trudeau was French Canadian made this task
not unpleasant for him.

That`s because — despite the national government`s
pro-French bias — French Canadians are much more likely to
be bilingual. After all, English is the dominant language of
North America (and, increasingly, of the world).
French, for all its venerable literary glories, is merely
treading water on the global second language market.

"Of deputy ministers and senior administrators the
proportion is now 32% francophone. The Privy Council Office
is 48.2% francophone. The Federal-Provincial Relations
Office is 49.1%, the Canadian Intergovernment Secretariat a
resounding 81.8%. The big-spending Department of Supply and
Services, which decides whether a contract will go, say, to
Montreal or Vancouver, is 41.1% francophone The Secretary of
State Department, which hands out federal largesse, is
67.9%. The Public Service Commission, which chiefly decides
on promotions within the civil service—will the job go to
Peter Black from Winnipeg or Pierre Leblanc of Trois
Rivieres?—is 60.5% francophone. And if the
francophone proportion of the armed forces during the
Second World War was
somewhat lacking, the francophone proportion of the
Department of Veterans Affairs compensates. It is 41.2%
francophone"[Here
are a few percentages Mr. Masse hasn`t mentioned,

This had multiple benefits to Trudeau. The immigrants were
quickly turned into
Liberal Party supporters by his political machine.

Moreover, the huge influx of immigrants helped the
government cajole and bully the polite British Canadians
into surrendering public expressions of their ancient ethnic
identity for a synthetic new
"propositional identity" (see Canadian blogger
Pithlord`s insightful discussion) centered on
celebrating
diversity, the
single-payer health finance system, and
anti-Americanism. English-speaking people were taught to be
embarrassed about being an English-speaking people, thus
demonizing and pre-empting what would have been the natural
response to Trudeau`s new special privileges for
Francophones: an officially Anglophone political party.

Like that village in
Vietnam, Trudeau had to
destroy
Canada
to save it.

The analogy of Trudeau to Obama shouldn`t be pressed too
far. Trudeau went through a genuine conversion moment away
from French Catholic ethnocentrism to an ideology of
post-ethnicity (on, roughly, D-Day).

In contrast, although I`ve speculated that Obama gave up on
the
Dreams from His Father of becoming a black leader after
his plan of becoming the second black mayor of Chicago was
shattered in 2000 by his defeat at the hands of a former
Black Panther who taunted him for not being black enough, we
simply don`t know
what he his
"fundamental commitments" are today.

Although Obama spent the last two years running for
President, nobody in the media asked him about the flagrant
contradictions between his 1995 autobiography, which is
obsessively devoted to his struggle to prove himself"black enough"to become a black leader, and his purportedly"post-racial"
2004-2008 campaign image.

For example: will Obama push hard for more affirmative
action?

I don`t know. However, we can be sure that he will
protect the huge array of existing racial quotas.

Normally, an economic catastrophe would inject some
hard-headed rationality into American politics. But,
Obamamania serves as a mind-numbing distraction from
considering how we got into this mess and how we can get out
of it.

At present, the American economy resembles a rapidly
deflating hot air balloon heading for a rough landing in
deep water. In that situation, normally, the balloon`s pilot
would be tossing overboard
useless luxuries in his effort to keep the balloon
aloft. Affirmative action is the single most obviousimpediment
to our economy that could be easily shed to boost our
overall efficiency.

Anybody familiar with Obama`s chosen city,
Chicago, knows that affirmative
action injects even more corruption and incompetence into
public works. For example, Obama`s old friend and fundraiserTony
Rezko, a white Syrian Catholic, long used Black Muslim
leader Elijah Muhammad`s son
Jabir as his minority business enterprise beard to get
lucrative contracts. I can still remember the taste of the
horrible hot dogs that Rezko sold as a result of his
minority set-aside contract to run the
Park District`s hot dog stands. (Obama showed no
interest in reforming how
w:st="on">Chicago politics is played. His focus has
always been on winning at Chicago-style politics.)

Yet is anybody talking about dropping quotas?

Obama has been banging on about his huge
infrastructure spending plan for a month. But nobody has
asked him if he`ll suspend minority set-aside contracts to
make it more effective.

Of course, he wouldn`t. But in the current state of national
delusion, it doesn`t even occur to anybody to ask.

On the other hand, Obama would be foolish to push so hard
for more quotas that it could lead to the public noticing.
(Although in the current media climate, I`m not sure if
that`s even possible.)

The Bush-Rove fiasco has provided Obama with a huge
opportunity to turn
w:st="on">America into a
Trudeauvian social democratic state with massively
increased government spending and government intervention.
All he has to do is go with the flow to win a permanent
triumph for the left.

And in that respect, Pierre Trudeau seems an unmistakable
precursor of Obama. Trudeau did not solve the nationalist
alienation of
w:st="on">Quebec, which continues like a rock under the
water of Canadian politics. But English Canada was
permanently damaged by him and has never recovered.